Monthly Archives: May 2005

by | 26 May 2005 · 4:57 am

Reporting from Mosul, 2005

Michael Yon, a journalist embedded with the U.S. military in Mosul, blogs his own take on war reporting as a business.

The media is an industry; but their business is not to report news. The industry needs a captive audience to beat the bottom line. The product is advertisement.

This is not a right or wrong. It’s just a business concept for moving merchandise, and every profession or industry has one. Doctors, soldiers, preachers, lawyers, journalists: everyone needs to earn a living. Only a reclusive holy man might argue otherwise, but most holy men also expect alms.

There are probably many reasons why violent acts get more attention than do acts of kindness. All of these reasons fit somewhere under the heading of human nature. Any person rummaging around in his or her own head while asking the simple question, “What do I find interesting?” is bound to find a few garish relics. Sex and someone else’s bad news will sell.

Finding or generating news can be costly. A good businessperson buys cheap, sells high. These points are obvious, but less conspicuous is how the media squeezes news cheaply from Iraq….

From a media executive’s perspective, where the CFO can occupy the same tier on the organizational chart as the managing editor, the math is easy: send a dozen journalists to Iraq, or hire one cheaply to live in Baghdad. The media gets a bargain rate on instant credibility from their “embedded journalist in the heart of the Sunni Triangle,” who spends a few minutes a day paraphrasing media releases, then heads downstairs for a beer at the hotel bar.

And now, for the rest of the story….

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by | 25 May 2005 · 12:46 pm

Reporting from the American Civil War

Like many other aspects of the Civil War, its war correspondents have been romanticised into legend….

The legend conveniently overlooks the fact that the majority of the Northern correspondents were ignorant, dishonest, and unethical; that the dispatches they wrote were frequently inaccurate, often invented, partisan, and inflammatory. Edwin Godkin [of the London Daily News] wrote of his American colleagues: “Their communications are what you might expect from men of this stamp–a series of wild ravings about the roaring of the guns and the whizzing of the shells and the superhuman valour of the men, interspersed with fulsome puffs of some captain or colonel with whom they happened to pass the night.” Henry Villard, one of the better American correspondents, said, “Men turned up in the army as correspondents more fit to drive cattle than to write for newspapers,” and Professor J. Cutler Andrews, in his mammoth work The North Reports the Civil War, wrote, “Sensationalism and exaggeration, outright lies, puffery, slander, faked eye-witness accounts, and conjectures built on pure imagination cheapened much that passed in the North for news.” Given that it was an age of declamatory journalism and that objectivity was a rare quality, it is still a little disconcerting to find that one correspondent saw his job in these terms: “It is not within the province of your correspondent to criticize what has been done by the army or navy; nor will he state occurrences which it may be unpleasant to read.” Like him, most correspondents on both sides saw as an integral part of their task the sustaining of both civilian and army morale. A skirmish became “a glorious overwhelming victory,” a rout was transformed into “a strategic withdrawal before a vastly superior enemy,” a dead Confederate soldier had been not merely killed in battle but “sacrificed to the devilish ambitions of his implacable masters, Davis and Lee”; Confederate women had necklaces made from Yankee eyes, while the “unholy Northerners” used heads of Confederate dead for footballs. In this sort of reporting, accuracy mattered little, and the Northerner Henry Adams wrote from London to complain that “people have become so accustomed to the idea of disbelieving everything that is stated in the American papers that all confidence in us is destroyed.”

The correspondents fared little better in recognising the historic incident, in realising that they were privileged to be present at moments millions would later want to study as part of their nation’s development. No correspondent attending the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg took any notice of President Lincoln beginning, “Four score and seven years ago …” At the best, they reported, as did the Cincinnati Commercial, “The President rises slowly, draws from his pocket a paper, and when the commotion subsides, in a sharp, unmusical treble voice, reads the brief and pithy remarks,” and, at the worst, ended their accounts of the event with the single sentence “The President also spoke.”

One would have expected that the war correspondents from Europe, more experienced, more mature, and less involved than their American colleagues, performed more ably in the Civil War. Unfortunately, the majority were as bad, if not worse. More subtle in their bias, more devious in their propaganda, and better assisted by the political intrigues of their editors, they completely misled their readers on what was really occurring in America. The Times of London was particularly bad.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 20-22

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by | 25 May 2005 · 10:19 am

British Reporting on the American Civil War

The American Civil War held considerable importance for Britain. In 1861 it was estimated that one-fifth of the entire British population was dependent directly or indirectly on the prosperity of the cotton-manufacturing areas, which in turn depended on the American South for 80 per cent of their supplies. This clear commercial relationship made for sympathy with the South, but after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation it also became an embarrassment, because then the commercial interest had to be reconciled with Britain’s long-preached sentiments of humanity. A country so experienced in moral accommodation would no doubt have had little difficulty in bringing about this reconciliation, but the issue was further complicated by a major political factor. The ruling class in Britain had nurtured a barely concealed hatred of America and her democratic institutions, and now clearly desired their downfall. If the American experiment in democracy could be shown to have failed, demands for greater democracy in Britain could be kept from becoming an issue. Britain’s interests in the war were, then, very strong, and at one stage it appeared highly likely that she would actually intervene–the American general Winfield Scott, in Paris on a propaganda mission for Lincoln, had to return to New York to prepare for its defence against a British invasion….

But The Times began with a heavy disadvantage. Its chief proprietor, its editor, and its foreign manager were all singularly ill-equipped to handle the news from America during this important period of history. The chief proprietor, John Walter III, was openly anti-Unionist. The editor, John Delane, was ignorant of American affairs and had little feeling for American institutions. The foreign manager, Mowbray Morris, had been born in the West Indies and was in sympathy with the South and slavery. Since these were the men who not only engaged the correspondents to cover the war but also presented the news the correspondents sent, it is not surprising that The Times’ coverage of the Civil War caused such a cleavage between the two nations that it required a generation to heal it….

The engagement of [biased] war correspondents like Mackay and [Francis] Lawley and the adoption of a pro-South attitude in its leading articles were bad enough, but The Times went even further to promote the Southern cause. When New Orleans fell it carried black mourning borders; it suppressed the fact that a Liverpool shipyard was building a warship, the famous Alabama, for the South and recorded her sailing to begin a career as a commerce raider in only five words in its “Ship News” column. And it commissioned Spence, the Confederate agent in Liverpool, to write a series of pro-South articles for The Times, under the signature “5,” for which it made him a gift of a specially bound edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The combination of poor and subjective war correspondents and the attitude at The Times’ office towards America produced a disastrous coverage of the war.

In July 1863, misled by Mackay (who was to be made to pay for it later), The Times confidently predicted that the Southern general Lee was about to capture Washington. In 1864 it reported Sherman’s march to the sea as a folly from which he would find it difficult to extricate himself. When Sherman reached Savannah, Delane was made physically ill by the set-back, but recovered rapidly and was able to write that The Times was doing its best “to attenuate the mischief.” This took the form of a piece in which Sherman was given credit for “one of the ablest, certainly one of the most singular military achievements of the war,” but which then went on to say that the South had little use for Savannah as a port anyway.

At the beginning of the war The Times referred to Lincoln as an uneducated rail-splitter. Half-way through the war he was “a sort of moral American Pope” or “Lincoln the Last.” When he was assassinated, he was suddenly recognised as having been “one of England’s best friends.” Naturally, this recognition that it had been wildly astray in its military and political estimates of the war was not accomplished by The Times without some unpleasant recriminations and extensive scapegoat-hunting. Although it was clear that at least some responsibility lay with the executives, who had allowed their prejudices to interfere with their selection of war correspondents and with the manner in which they were briefed, blame had to be placed farther down the editorial ladder. So Mackay was peremptorily sacked. Morris broke the news to him. “This has been brought about by your blind and unreasonable condemnation of all public men and measures on the Federal side,” he wrote. “You have presented the English public with a distorted view of the Federal cause … Every statement was one-sided and every remark spiteful.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 34-40

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by | 24 May 2005 · 12:13 pm

Reporting from the Crimean War

William Howard Russell [was], according to his epigraph in St. Paul’s Cathedral “the first and greatest” war correspondent. The greatest is open to dispute, and he was not the first …. But Russell’s coverage of the Crimean War [1854-1856] marked the beginning of an organised effort to report a war to the civilian population at home using the services of a civilian reporter. This was an immense leap in the history of journalism, so it is appropriate to begin with Russell, because, whether or not “the first and the greatest,” he was certainly, as he put it himself, “the miserable parent of a luckless tribe.”…

Russell returned to London and fame. The Times made the gesture every war correspondent dreams of: it put aside his IOUs for advance expenses and told him he could start again “with what tradesmen call a clean slate.” He was placed on the list of Times foreign correspondents at £600 a year, providing “you will render monthly accounts of your expenditure showing a clean balance so that we may both know how we stand.” He had breakfast with the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who, mistakenly believing that Russell’s criticisms of the conduct of the war must have been inspired by his having evolved constructive alternatives, disconcerted Russell by asking him what he would do if he were commander-in-chief of the army. After the war Russell’s dispatches were published in book form, and while awaiting new battles to cover he went on a lecture tour.

Clearly, it would have been hard for Russell not to have made a name for himself in the Crimea. This was the first time that a British army in the field had been subjected to any form of independent scrutiny, and it would have been difficult to miss its shortcomings. Russell certainly chronicled them, but he failed to understand and expose the causes. He concentrated his attacks on Raglan rather than on the system, not knowing that Raglan, a humane and sensitive man, had done his best to overcome the results of years of government neglect. Throughout the campaign, Raglan had made repeated requests for all manner of equipment and supplies to overcome deficiencies in the commissariat and the medical departments, but most of his requests had been ignored. When public clamour led to a demand for a scapegoat, Russell’s dispatches helped make Raglan a convenient choice.

Although Russell criticised the lot of the ordinary soldier in the Crimea, he was careful not to hammer too hard at a comparison with that of the officers, to whose social class he himself belonged. He did not write, as he could quite accurately have done: “While the troops, ill-clad to weather a Russian winter, try to ease their hunger with a watery stew made of doubtful horseflesh, tonight in the officers’ mess the menu consists of soup, fresh fish, liver and bacon, a shoulder of mutton, pancakes with quince preserve, cheese, stout, sherry and cigars.” Above all, Russell made the mistake, common to many a war correspondent, of considering himself part of the military establishment. The one thing he never doubted or criticised was the institution of war itself. He realised he had hit the right note in criticising the conduct of the war and that his dispatches suited The Times’ politics of the moment. (Russell tended to toe his paper’s editorial line despite his professional assessments.)…

It is clear that before the war ended the army realised that it had made a mistake in tolerating Russell and his colleagues, but by then it was too late. The war correspondent had arrived, and when the American Civil War broke out, five years later, 500 of them turned out to report the conflict on the Northern side alone.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 1-17

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by | 23 May 2005 · 7:27 pm

PsyOps in Southern Afghanistan

M. E. “Eddie” Roberts, a U.S. Army soldier in southern Afghanistan has just published an account of his experiences entitled Villages of the Moon: Psychological Operations in Southern Afghanistan. Various excerpts are online but, apart from the photos, I find them confusing, poorly written, full of military jargon, and far from illuminating.

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by | 23 May 2005 · 11:04 am

Gulag Epilogue: Memory and Human Understanding

Our failure in the West to understand the magnitude of what happened in the Soviet Union and central Europe does not, of course, have the same profound implications for our way of life as it does for theirs. Our tolerance for the odd “Gulag denier” in our universities will not destroy the moral fabric of our society. The Cold War is over, after all, and there is no real intellectual or political force left in the communist parties of the West.

Nevertheless, if we do not start trying harder to remember, there will be consequences for us too. For one, our understanding of what is happening now in the former Soviet Union will go on being distorted by our misunderstanding of history. Again, if we really knew what Stalin did to the Chechens, and if we felt that it was a terrible crime against the Chechen nation, it is not only Vladimir Putin who would be unable to do the same things to them now, but we also would be unable to sit back and watch with any equanimity. Nor did the Soviet Union’s collapse inspire the same mobilization of Western forces as the end of the Second World War. When Nazi Germany finally fell, the rest of the West created both NATO and the European Community–in part to prevent Germany from ever breaking away from civilized “normality” again. By contrast, it was not until September 11, 2001, that the nations of the West seriously began rethinking their post-Cold War security policies, and then there were other motivations stronger than the need to bring Russia back into the civilization of the West.

But in the end, the foreign-policy consequences are not the most important. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening? Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British Spectator magazine opined that the Cold War was “one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time.” The American writer Gore Vidal has also described the battles of the Cold War as “forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion.”

Already, we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of “the West” together for so long: we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is.

And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe’s history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century’s mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical, and cultural origins, everyone arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been–and will be–repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into “enemies,” our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds, our reinvention of our victims as lower, lesser, or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or expulsion or death.

The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written “so that it will not happen again,” as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the “objective enemy,” as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why–and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, apart of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 575-577

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by | 22 May 2005 · 10:01 am

Bitter Taste of Freedom from the Gulag

Release [from the Gulag], whether it came in 1926 or 1956, had always left prisoners with mixed feelings. Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, a prisoner released in the 1930s, was surprised by his own reaction:

I imagined that I would be dancing instead of walking, that when I finally got my freedom I’d be drunk with it. But when I was actually released, I felt none of this. I walked through the gates and past the last guard, experiencing no happiness or sense of uplift … There, along the sun-drenched platform ran two young girls in light dresses, merrily laughing about something. I looked at them in astonishment. How could they laugh? How could all these people walk around conversing and laughing as if nothing unusual was happening in the world, as if nothing nightmarish and unforgettable stood in their midst …

After Stalin’s death [in 1953] and Khrushchev’s speech [in 1956], the releases came more rapidly, and reactions became even more confused. Prisoners who had expected to spend another decade behind barbed wire were let go on a day’s notice. One group of exiles was summoned during working hours to the offices of their mine, and simply told to go home. As one remembered, Spetskomandant Lieutenant Isaev “opened a safe, pulled out our documents, and distributed them …” Prisoners who had filed petition after petition, demanding a re-examination of their cases, suddenly found that further letters were unnecessary–they could simply walk away.

Prisoners who had thought of nothing else except freedom were strangely reluctant to experience it: “Although I could hardly believe it myself, I was weeping as I walked out to freedom … I felt as though I had torn my heart away from what was dearest and most precious to it, from my comrades in misfortune. The gates closed–and it was all finished.”

Many were simply not ready. Yuri Zorin, riding a crowded prisoners’ train south from Kotlas in 1954, made it past only two stations. “Why am I going to Moscow?” he asked himself–and then turned around and headed back to his old camp, where his ex-commander helped him get a job as a free worker. There he remained, for another sixteen years. Evgeniya Ginzburg knew a woman who actually did not want to leave her barracks: “The thing is that I–I can’t face living outside. I want to stay in camp,” she told her friends. Another wrote in his diary that “I really don’t want freedom. What is drawing me to freedom? It seems to me that out there … there are lies, hypocrisy, thoughtlessness. Out there, everything is fantastically unreal, and here, everything is real.” Many did not trust Khrushchev, expected the situation to worsen again, and took jobs as free workers in Vorkuta or Norilsk. They preferred not to experience the emotions and undergo the hassle of return, if they were ultimately to be re-arrested anyway.

But even those who wanted to return home often found it nearly impossible to do so. They had no money, and very little food. Camps released prisoners with the equivalent of 500 grams of bread for every day they were expected to be on the road–a starvation ration. Even that was insufficient, since they were often on the road much longer than expected, as it proved almost impossible to obtain tickets on the few planes and trains leading south. Arriving at the station in Krasnoyarsk, Ariadna Efron found “such a crowd, that to leave was impossible, simply impossible. People from all of the camps were there, from all of Norilsk.” She was finally given a ticket out of the blue by an “angel,” a woman who by chance had two. Otherwise, she might have waited for months.

Facing a similarly crowded train, Galina Usakova, like many others, solved the problem by riding home on a baggage rack. Still others did not make it at all: it was not uncommon for prisoners to die on the difficult journey home, or within weeks or months of arrival. Weakened by their years of hard labor, tired out by exhausting journeys, the emotions surrounding their return overwhelmed them, resulting in heart attacks and strokes. “How many people died from this freedom!” one prisoner marveled.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 511-512

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by | 22 May 2005 · 8:06 am

Asashoryu Ties Musashimaru’s Record

Mongolian sumo grand champion Asashoryu won yet another tournament trophy, with yet another perfect 15-0 record. Fellow Mongolian Kyokushuzan (“Supermarket of Tricks“) won his first Fighting Spirit award, along with Futeno. Tom at That’s News to Me has a fuller recap.

Asashoryu is now tied with Samoan-born Hawai‘i-raised Musashimaru, now retired, for the most wins by a foreign rikishi, at 12 each. I expect Asashoryu to pull ahead at the next Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament in July, but I still like Musashimaru. According to this source, during the time the two faced each other in 2001-2002, Musashimaru won 5 out of their 9 bouts, but I’m sure Asashoryu has only gotten better since his rookie days. Here‘s what happened when the two faced each other on the opening day of the Nagoya tournament in July 2001, in which Musashimaru was the sole yokozuna and Asashoryu was a rising komusubi. A lot of other names familiar from recent tournaments also get mentioned.

NAGOYA, [2001] July 8 (Kyodo) – Yokozuna Musashimaru was all business on Sunday as the firm title favorite lifted komusubi Asashoryu out of the ring while three ozeki tumbled to opening-day defeats in the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament.

Musashimaru, the lone grand champion in the 15-day meet after summer tourney champion Takanohana pulled out because of a knee injury, let his experience do the talking as he calmly disposed of the 20-year-old Mongolian rising star at Aichi Prefectural Gymnasium.

Asashoryu tried to grapple head-on after the face-off but was muscled out of the ring easily in the day’s final bout, failing to repeat his upset win over the Samoan-born yokozuna on the first day of the summer tournament.

Ozeki Chiyotaikai, aiming to go better than his 12-3 finish in May, showed little resistance against Wakanosato as he backpedaled straight out of the ring to hand the komusubi returnee a comfortable win.

Sekiwake Tochiazuma gave the crowd another surprise when he pulled Musoyama out of the ring soon after the ozeki precariously came lunging out of the face-off, only to get himself off-balance against the upset-minded Tamanoi stable wrestler.

Also joining the list of upset victims was ozeki Miyabiyama, who got the better of top-ranked maegashira Hayateumi for much of their bout but lacked the finishing touches along the straw ridge in a force-out defeat.

In other feature bouts, Ozeki Kaio and Dejima both battled their ways to victory against maegashira opponents as they try to avoid relegation from sumo’s second highest rank after suffering dismal records in May.

Kaio quickly shoved No. 2 Kotonowaka out of the ring while Dejima, who also requires a minimum of eight wins to avoid demotion, was in total command as he thrust and slapped top-ranked Takanonami before lifting him out with an arm maneuver.

Earlier, No. 2 maegashira Higonoumi twisted and tossed sekiwake Kotomitsuki backwards over the edge. Takanowaka backed out Mongolian Kyokushuzan for an easy win in a bout between No. 5 maegashira.

At Nagoya the following year, Asashoryu bested Musashimaru, but the latter won their final bout at the Aki [Fall] Basho, where Musashimaru won the tournament then announced his retirement.

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by | 21 May 2005 · 9:05 am

Polish Diaspora from the Gulag

On July 30, 1941, a month after the launch of [Hitler’s Operation] Barbarossa, General Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government-in-exile in London, and Ambassador Maisky, the Soviet envoy to Great Britain, signed a truce. The Sikorski-Maisky Pact, as the treaty was called, re-established a Polish state–its borders still to be determined–and granted an amnesty to “all [1,500,000 or more!] Polish citizens who are at present deprived of their freedom on the territory of the USSR.”

Both Gulag prisoners and deported exiles were officially freed, and allowed to join a new division of the Polish army, to be formed on Soviet soil. In Moscow, General Wladyslaw Anders, a Polish officer who had been imprisoned in Lubyanka for the previous twenty months, learned that he had been named commander of the new army during a surprise meeting with [NKVD Chief Lavrenty] Beria himself. After the meeting, General Anders left the prison in a chauffeured NKVD car, wearing a shirt and trousers, but no shoes….

Other Polish prisoners were released from camps or exile settlements but not given any money or told where to go. One ex-prisoner recalled that “The Soviet authorities in Omsk didn’t want to help us, explaining that they knew nothing about any Polish army, and instead proposed that we find work near Omsk.” An NKVD officer gave Herling a list of places where he could get a residence permit, but denied all knowledge of a Polish army. Following rumors, the released Polish prisoners hitchhiked and rode trains around the Soviet Union, looking for the Polish army.

Stefan Waydenfeld’s family, exiled to northern Russia, were not told of the existence of the Polish army at all, nor offered any means of transport whatsoever: they were simply told they could go. In order to get away from their remote exile village, they built a raft, and floated down their local river toward “civilization”–a town which had a railway station. Months later, they were finally rescued from their wanderings when, in a cafe in the town of Chimkent, southern Kazakhstan, Stefan recognized a classmate from his school in Poland. She told them, finally, where to find the Polish army….

Employees of the Polish Embassy, deployed around the country, were still subject to unexplained arrest. Fearing the situation might worsen, General Anders changed his plan in March 1942. Instead of marching his army west, toward the front line, he won permission to evacuate his troops out of the Soviet Union altogether. It was a vast operation: 74,000 Polish troops, and another 41,000 civilians, including many children, were put on trains and sent to Iran.

In his haste to leave, General Anders left thousands more Poles behind, along with their Jewish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian former fellow citizens. Some eventually joined the Kosciuszko division, a Polish division of the Red Army. Others had to wait for the war to end to be repatriated. Still others never left at all. To this day, some of their descendants still live in ethnic Polish communities in Kazakhstan and northern Russia.

Those who left kept fighting. After recovering in Iran, Anders’s army did manage to join the Allied forces in Europe. Traveling via Palestine–and in some cases via South Africa–they later fought for the liberation of Italy at the Battle of Montecassino. While the war continued, the Polish civilians were parceled out to various parts of the British Empire. Polish children wound up in orphanages in India, Palestine, even east Africa. Most would never return to Soviet-occupied, postwar Poland. The Polish clubs, Polish historical societies, and Polish restaurants still found in West London are testimony to their postwar exile.

After they had left the USSR, the departed Poles performed an invaluable service for their less fortunate ex-fellow inmates. In Iran and Palestine, the army and the Polish government-in-exile conducted several surveys of the soldiers and their families in order to determine exactly what had happened to the Poles deported to the Soviet Union. Because the Anders evacuation was the only large group of prisoners ever allowed to leave the USSR, the material produced by these questionnaires and somewhat rushed historical inquiries remained the only substantial evidence of the Gulag’s existence for half a century. And, within limits, it was surprisingly accurate: although they had no real understanding of the Gulag’s history, the Polish prisoners did manage to convey the camp system’s staggering size, its geographical extent–all they had to do was list the wide variety of places they had been sent–and its horrific wartime living conditions.

After the war, the Poles’ descriptions of their experiences formed the basis for reports on Soviet forced-labor camps produced by the Library of Congress and the American Federation of Labor. Their straightforward accounts of the Soviet slave-labor system came as a shock to many Americans, whose awareness of the camps had dimmed since the days of the Soviet timber boycotts in the 1920s. These reports circulated widely, and in 1949, in an attempt to persuade the United Nations to investigate the practice of forced labor in its member states, the AFL presented the UN with a thick body of evidence of its existence in the Soviet Union…. The Cold War had begun.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 451-454

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by | 20 May 2005 · 8:35 pm

Head Heeb on Truth and Alienation in Fiji

The Head Heeb, who knows more about far-outlying parts of the globe than anyone else I know, has an insightful post on Fiji’s attempt at Truth and Reconciliation.

Fiji, which has had far too many political controversies in its recent history, is now in the grip of another one – and the cause, ironically, is a bill designed to promote national reconciliation. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase announced his intention to suspend prosecutions in connection with the May 2000 coup, and replace the judicial process with a Reconciliation and Unity Commission modeled on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission….

The bill is likely to be popular among much of the indigenous Fijian population, which is looking for closure and is growing tired of the continuing spectacle of trials and recriminations. The Qarase government, for its part, has been embarrassed at the number of high government officials convicted of participating in the coup, and may also be looking for a graceful way to give in to its right-wing coalition partners’ demand for a general amnesty….

The trouble with this rhetoric, however, is that it doesn’t speak for the 44 percent of the population that is of Indian origin, few of whom are Christian and who come from a different tradition of justice. As Qarase acknowledged later in the speech, they were the primary victims of the coup, and most of them don’t regard amnesty as closure. Instead, they view closure in terms of just punishment for the coup plotters and restoration of their own place in society. Others – like the military, which believes that amnesty would reward lawlessness – also oppose the bill, but the primary opposition has come from the largely Indo-Fijian Labour Party, which is not only campaigning against the proposal but will seek to pre-empt it through judicial review. Labour – whose leader, Mahendra Chaudhry, was the prime minister who was ousted in the coup – has characterized the commission as an attempt to pander to indigenous votes and “a signal that people could commit terrible crimes and get away with it.”

Read the rest, including the comments, which begin with the following astute observation.

It seems to me that truth and reconciliation polices require that the victimized party be in power (as in South Africa) or at least that the abuses be identified with an out-of-power political faction (as in some of the South American cases). In this case, when you have an ethnicity-based conflict where the minority took most of the damage and the majority is now offering to shake hands and start over — it’s not surprising that it’s going over poorly.

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